Tell us about your organization. How big is your team? Where are you based? What is your organization’s specialty in the film and video space?
We’re STLL Studios, based just outside Austin in Lakeway, Texas. We’ve got a core team of 5 people, and then we scale from there depending on the job, some days we’re five people, some days we’re forty. We started in 2022 with the idea of being vertically integrated: concept, production, post, all under one roof, so a client isn’t stitching together three vendors to get one film made. Commercial and branded work is our bread and butter, we’ve worked with multiple global and national brands through our strategic partnerships with Advertising agencies, we have a specialty: story. We treat a 60-second spot with the same excitement we’d treat a 90mins feature film.
Why do you do what you do? Was there a transformative moment that solidified your career choice, your org’s success, or your commitment to storytelling?
I grew up between three languages and cultures, and I think that’s where all of this comes from. When you spend your life translating, not just words, but context, tone, what somebody actually means, you end up paying attention to people in a specific way. That’s the whole job. A camera is just the tool.
I started producing in New York back in 2013, I grabbed my wife’s camera and started creating content like fashion films, short films, until an Agency hired me to produce a regional campaign, I totally fell in love with the experience, I keep chasing that feeling of collaboration and being creative ever since.
That’s the thing that keeps me and it hasn’t changed since I started. Watching somebody watch a film we made and seeing their face do something they weren’t expecting. That never gets old. Everything else, the gear, the clients, the company, is in service of that.
Tell us about your Telly Award winning piece. What’s the story behind it?
FORZA started as a dream of being able to film a Formula 1 race car. On paper it’s a car piece. Fast cars, a track, all the stuff that looks great in a cutdown.
But we didn’t want to make a car commercial. Anybody can shoot a car and make it look cool, that’s a solved problem. What I kept coming back to was the person, [the driver / the character and what they’re after], and what the car actually means to them. So we built the whole thing around that, and the speed became the backdrop instead of the point.
That decision made the shoot harder and the film better. It’s the piece I point to when somebody asks what STLL does differently.
Can you share a behind the scenes story or fun fact about the making of your piece?
We shot the whole thing in Dallas in three consecutive days, which is not a lot of days for what ended up on screen. The only reason it worked is the people.
Adan had a very clear vision for the film, and the entire crew basically organized themselves around protecting it. David Wells (DP) arrived to the location a day before so he could see the track and plan for weather, Jonathan Williams drove his G&E truck down from Austin so we’d be fully equipped and never had to say “we can’t do that shot.” We partnered with House of Edits, with Spencer Davis producing and Jacob Geeslin in the master edit. Nate Strayer opened up Stray Vista so we could grab pickup shots. And on day two, Seehum Isa from Prelude Films showed up to help and brought breakfast for the entire crew, which, if you’ve ever been on a day-two call time, you know is basically a religious experience.
None of those people had to do any of that. That’s the fact. Three days, and everybody showed up for somebody else’s vision like it was their own, and you can see it in the final result. Everyone was over the moon when we won the Gold Telly Award for it.
What was your biggest challenge during production and how did you solve it?
Weather, as usual. Rain kept rolling in and out the entire three days, and when you’re shooting cars on a track, you don’t get to fake a dry road.
There’s no clever solution to that one. You just stay ready. We reordered the schedule constantly, chasing the clear windows, pulling interiors and coverage forward when the sky turned, then jumping back out the second it opened up. Everybody stayed loose and nobody panicked, which is a crew thing more than a plan thing. In the end we got every shot we needed under a clear sky. If you watch the film you’d never know it rained.
What are you most proud of about this piece? What is the most memorable response you got from this work?
It’s easy to make pretty pictures. And shooting fast cars on a track is genuinely fun, it’s exciting, it looks great, and it’s not that hard to make people go “whoa.”
What’s hard is making something people actually feel. The action sequence in this piece is awesome, I’m proud of it, but what I’m most proud of is that the story landed. People who don’t care about cars watched it and got something out of it. That’s the part you can’t buy with a bigger camera package.
Pretty images are great. Connection is priceless.
You won a Telly Award for this piece. Why is recognition important for you, your team or your work?
We don’t make things for awards. We make them so people connect with them, that’s the whole point, and no trophy changes whether a film worked.
But recognition does two things. It pushes you. You finish one, you get some validation, and immediately you want the next one to be better. It’s fuel. And the other thing is reach: the more people see the work, the more the work does what it’s supposed to do. An award puts a film in front of people who’d never have found it otherwise. So it’s not the destination, it’s a bigger door.
And I’ll be honest, for a crew that gave up three days in the Texas rain and sun, it’s nice for them to get their name written on gold.
Tell us what you’re up to! If there’s a new project, launch, or milestone you’d like us to celebrate with you, let us know, and we might share it with our community.
Big one for us: we launched STLL Entertainment, our narrative feature division. We’ve got two features — Each Other’s Country, directed by Olexiy Kryvych, and Odie, written and directed by Nick Barr — and both are heading into their festival run.
That’s been the long game since we started the company in 2022. Build the commercial side, build the team, build the infrastructure, and then use all of it to make the films we actually want to make. Seeing two features get to this stage is the milestone I’d want to celebrate.
